Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Figs

Christina Agapakis shares what may be her "new favorite symbiotic relationship":

Figs
are not actually fruits but a mass of inverted flowers and seeds that
are pollinated by a species of tiny symbiotic wasps. The male fig flower
is the only place where the female wasp can lay her eggs, at the bottom
of a narrow opening in the fruit that she shimmies her way through. The
baby wasps mature inside the fig into males that have sharp teeth but
no wings and females ready to fly. They mate, the males chew through the
special fig pollen holders and drop them down to the females, chew
holes in the skin of the fig to let the females out, and then die.

The
females, armed with the pollen, fly off in search of new male figs to
lay her eggs in. In the process some of the female wasps land on female
figs that don't have the special egg receptacle but trick the female
into shimmying inside. As the female wasp slides through the narrow
passage in the fig her wings are ripped off (egg laying is a one-way
mission) and while she is unsuccessful in laying her eggs, she
successfully pollinates the female flower. The female flower then ripens
into the fig that you can get at the supermarket, digesting the trapped
wasp inside with specialized enzymes!

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